Heidi Williamson – författare

In her second collection, printer's daughter Heidi Williamson mines the rich language and history of printing to consider themes of belonging, parenthood, love, and how we communicate, and fail to communicate, with each other. Individual, familial, and cultural inheritance is explored - through subjects ranging from Gutenberg to Gill, Kindles, Twitter, ultrasounds, the death of Diana, 3D printing, climate change, childlessness, genes, and what is downloadable. By turns sensual, playful, and stark, The Print Museum collects exhibits and fragments from this fading industrial art and displays them alongside pieces driven by the same forces of longing, loss, transformation and delight. Winner of the Poetry Category and Book by the Cover award, East Anglian Book Awards, 2016.

In her second collection, printer’s daughter Heidi Williamson mines the rich language and history of printing to consider themes of belonging, parenthood, love, and how we communicate, and fail to communicate, with each other. Individual, familial and cultural inheritance is explored - through subjects ranging from Gutenberg to Gill, Kindles, Twitter, ultrasounds, the death of Diana, 3D printing, climate change, childlessness, genes, and what is downloadable. By turns sensual, playful, and stark, The Print Museum collects exhibits and fragments from this fading industrial art and displays them alongside pieces driven by the same forces of longing, loss, transformation and delight. ‘Heidi Williamson’s poems are about contact with the haunted world. She understands uncertainty and loss, as well as the trace loss leaves behind as memory, memory that acts like a Blitz incendiary waiting to ignite later in life. The sensuousness of language is asserted…through tender explorations of our haunted fabric.’ - George Szirtes ‘Williamson knows that poetry is a means of investigation, rigorous and disciplined; her poems often begin with a thought that a lesser poet would be content to end with. This approach is evident in the beautiful precision of her language, the way form itself becomes a means of discovery.’ - Esther Morgan ‘At their heart is human tenderness and a sense of human friability... The poems display an incisive mind, a powerful imagination and an equally impressive purchase on language.'' - Moniza Alvi & Paul Farley, PBS Bulletin, on Electric Shadow

In her mid-20s, Heidi Williamson was part of a Scottish community that suffered an inconceivable tragedy, the Dunblane Primary School shooting. Those years living in the town form the focus of her third poetry collection. Through rivers, rain, wildlife and landscape, she revisits where ‘the occasional endures’ and discovers the healing properties of a beloved place:'These small movementstowards the brackenare to be reckoned with.'

Heidi Williamson’s first collection is peopled with vibrant and disturbing shadows. The Northern Lights reach down beneath the London skyline, James Dean learns the craft of distance, Darwin staggers across a heaving ship, Coleridge slumbers on to another dream, and The Travelling Salesman turns a calculator on us. Fuelled by a residency at the London Science Museum’s Dana Centre, Williamson’s fascination with science leads her to explore less usual territories for poetry, including mathematics, chemistry, and computer programming, as well as space travel, electricity, and evolution. As she investigates the limits of personal and factual knowledge with ‘eyes wide open’, the driving force throughout is a desire to understand the ‘astonishing state of possibilities’ in the world around and inside us. A Poetry Book Society Recommendation, it was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize.